With his inauguration, President Trump adopted a myriad of executive orders, many of which are purposely designed to accelerate climate disruption by increasing fossil-fuel use and hampering the transition to renewable energy. An action of audacious ignorance and greed, it will be resisted for many reasons by many people. But, because it comes at the last possible moment for us to protect ourselves by transitioning away from fossil fuels, it will cause considerable damage to the future of human civilization.

Trump officially declared a national emergency due to “insufficient energy production, transportation, refining, and generation” despite, as The New York Times points out, “the United States is currently producing more oil and natural gas than any other country.” Robinson Meyer describes in the Times that the overall goal of Trump’s many executive orders is “to make the market for fossil fuels as big as possible” in order to “lock in oil and gas demand for the long term.” Former Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm notes how Trump’s fossil-fuels-only agenda will help China and further degrade America’s manufacturing capacity, and it also puts the U.S. at odds with the rest of the world. Tom Friedman suggests that these nonsensical policies are an example of right-wing “wokeism.”

The Washington Post notes that increasing fossil-fuel use will accelerate the real emergency of climate change. In The New Yorker, Bill McKibben writes: “Our leader has declared a fake emergency about energy, so that we can do more of something — drilling for oil and gas — that causes the actual emergency now devastating our second most populous city.” Trump “confuses attention with reality (just as Biden sometimes confused reality with attention). It’s an emergency all right.”

Trump also ordered federal agencies to stop using the social cost of carbon when assessing the benefits and costs of their actions. This is an order to ignore the known costs associated with climate change and fossil-fuel use, making believe that climate science and the health impacts of fossil-fuel combustion do not exist. The order says that the social cost of carbon has “a poor basis in empirical science,” when it relies on the work of Nobel Laureate economist William Nordhaus. The breath-taking ignorance of this action is astonishing. It is as though the President has decided to outlaw antibiotics, seat belts or fire-safe roofs.

The new President is also attempting to destroy a growing industry in the U.S., stating “we aren’t going to do the wind thing.” The New York Times reports that another executive order “would halt all leasing of federal lands and waters for new wind farms pending a fresh government review of the industry. It also directs federal agencies to stop issuing permits for all wind farms anywhere in the country for the time being, a move that could disrupt projects on private land, which sometimes need federal wildlife or other environmental permits.” Eleven commercial-scale offshore-wind farms have already been approved by the Biden Administration and are under construction or in an advanced state of planning. Trump also directed the U.S. Attorney General and the Secretary of the Interior to investigate whether existing leases can be terminated or amended. Grist notes that this strategy, however, might set a precedent that would interfere with the Trump Administration’s goal of expanding leases for offshore-oil development.

This order could be catastrophic for offshore wind, and for the states who have invested in the port facilities to support this growing industry (25 ports are being upgraded to support the offshore-wind industry). States such as Massachusetts, New Jersey and New York are also counting on offshore wind to meet their targets for renewable energy. Canary Media reports that, even though there is no truth to Trump’s absurd claims that wind turbines “kill whales” and “cause cancer,” the President’s opposition will have a chilling effect. Ørsted, a leading offshore wind company, saw its shares drop 17% after Trump signed the executive order.

The New York Times notes that the U.S. wind industry provides 10% of the nation’s electricity and is a major source of power in Republican-led states like Iowa, Oklahoma and Texas. “Nearly 40 gigawatts of wind projects — enough to power tens of millions of homes — are under development in the Atlantic Ocean and in states like Wyoming, Montana and North Dakota.” Consequently, Trump’s baseless attack on this industry will face stiff resistance in Congress and around the country (Canary Media indicates that “over 64% of the offshore wind manufacturing and supply-chain investments made or announced are in Republican congressional districts”). Says one official of a pro-wind group, “I think this projection of powers they don’t have is a scare tactic… to scare investors, to scare energy companies, to scare proponents of offshore wind to give up. We have no intention of giving up.”

The New York Times reports that President Trump also officially informed the United Nations that the U.S. would withdraw from the Paris Climate Accord. The actual withdrawal will occur in a year, at which point the U.S. will join Libya, Iran and Yemen as the only non-signatory nations. Grist notes that this action is mostly symbolic, and it is domestic policy that is driving U.S. emissions. Trump will clearly make it much harder to achieve reductions, which will enrich the fossil-fuel industry at the expense of human civilization. Reuters reports that the Bloomberg Philanthropies will be covering the U.S. obligation to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, which is the organization implementing the Paris Accord and operating the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Accord in 2017 was the stimulus for one of my earliest posts, We Will Always Have Paris. I wrote then: “While this is an incredibly short-sighted decision based upon ideological nonsense that will damage our nation’s standing in the world, it is not the end of the Paris Agreement nor of the United States’ move toward a carbon-free economy.” Indeed, Reuters reports that $2.1 trillion was invested in low-carbon energy last year, 11% more than 2023, “driven by renewable energy, power grids and electrified transport and energy storage investment.”

The Washington Post takes a detailed look at sea level rise in the southeastern United States, which has accelerated recently. While Donald Trump has been making preposterous statements about how sea level will rise an eighth of an inch in 400 years, right in his neighborhood sea level has gone up over six inches in the last 15 years. There are several factors that are driving this high rate of rise, including melting ice, subsiding land (due in part to groundwater withdrawal), changing ocean currents and warming water. The article includes a nice historic look at the methods for measuring sea level, and some excellent animated graphics. A recent study summarized in The Guardian concludes that just one meter of sea level rise will be enough to damage some of the world’s major coastal oil terminals.

Cities on the California coast commonly have piers, some built more that 150 years ago to support cargo vessels and passenger ships. In modern times, many of the piers have been repurposed for recreational and tourist uses. The New York Times describes how sea level rise and the larger waves caused by more powerful storms are damaging piers, even those that have been recently retrofitted. This is causing severe economic impacts to the pier-related businesses, and making local governments rethink the suitability of piers in our new climate regime.

A court in Montana found in favor of a group of young people who sued the state, claiming their rights were being violated by Montana not taking climate change into account when making permitting decisions. Grist reports that in the case, Held v. Montana, “16 youth plaintiffs argued that the state’s promotion of fossil fuel infrastructure had jeopardized their physical and mental health, traditions, and recreational interests.” There’s a wide array of opinions among legal analysts as to the ultimate effect of this decision, as it hinged on a component of the state’s constitution that is shared with only a few others. Regardless, the facts about climate change have again been recognized and upheld in a court of law.

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